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September 09, 2024

What Happens to Hormone Balance During an Infrared Sauna Session

Women's Health, Holistic Wellness, Longevity

Infrared heat works as a stealthy superhero with a mission to balance your hormones for optimal health, wellness and longevity. The end result? You feel a whole lot better, longer. Here’s how infrared heat helps optimize your hormones. 

Even if you’re only a little familiar with infrared sauna therapy, you might be aware that regular exposure to infrared heat comes with a slew of benefits. Aiding in muscle recovery, combating inflammation, and strengthening your immune system are a few. But one of the biggest benefits of using an infrared sauna is helping your body balance your hormones. 

Dry heat, such as the kind used in a Sunlighten sauna can recalibrate your hormones. And while there’s proven research for menopause relief, men and women, including those not in menopause or perimenopause can experience the hormonal benefits of infrared heat.

Read on to find out what’s happening to specific hormones in your body with regular infrared sauna exposure.

Not sure what your hormones exactly do? Start here. 

Think of your hormones as tiny, chemical mail carriers. Its job is to send messages, or signals, via the bloodstream and tissues throughout the body. These signals are responsible for managing all the body’s major functions. Your mood, focus, metabolism, sleep, and more all operate based on how balanced your hormones are. Stress, your diet, menopause, medications you take, and other factors can all contribute to a hormonal imbalance.

Infrared sauna heat assists the endocrine system

If hormones are the mail carriers, think of the endocrine system as the post office. This network of glands and tissues are responsible for creating and releasing hormones. The endocrine system is also the first to know when there’s a hormone imbalance.

Research has shown that sauna exposure, particularly using dry heat, can decrease or stabilize cortisol and increase endorphins1. This is why you feel so good immediately after sitting in a sauna. Infrared heat from a sauna can also increase growth hormones produced by the pituitary gland2, which is important for muscle and bone health.

Sauna therapy stimulates cardiovascular hormones

Regular sauna exposure has lots of cardiovascular benefits thanks to creating more efficient blood flow in the body. This lowers blood pressure and resting heart rate when compared to your baseline metrics, like physical activity does. It’s this same exposure to high temperatures that creates hormone changes that can improve cardiovascular health. Sitting in a sauna stimulates the sympathetic nervous system (SNS)3, which handles vital organ functions like regulating heart rate and blood flow throughout the body.  

Research published in Circulation found that heat activates the SNS, and this increases the production of norepinephrine4, a neurotransmitter and hormone that regulates blood pressure in times of stress. (It’s responsible for how your body manages “fight or flight” mode, too.) Renin is another hormone that increases when exposed to sauna heat5, a hormone produced by the adrenal glands, controls blood pressure.  

How sauna therapy impacts metabolic hormones

Your body is full of brain-gut peptides, hormones in the gastrointestinal tract that control appetite and eating behaviors. Research published in Acta Physiologica found that after a 20-minute sauna session, women experienced an increase in vasoactive intestinal polypeptide (VIP), a hormone that promotes blood flow in the gastrointestinal tract and plasma pancreatic polypeptide (PP), a hormone that manages appetite6. The increase of these metabolic hormones helps balance body weight and composition.

Sauna therapy optimizes your body’s hormones for total well-being and longevity 

There are so many environmental stressors your body deals with on a daily basis. Most you can’t see or feel. This isn’t meant to scare you. Diet, exercise, and other healthy lifestyle habits prime your body to deal with these everyday stressors. Establishing the daily habit of using an infrared sauna, like Sunlighten, is one of the holistic and effective ways to keep your hormones balanced and help you ease the effects of aging.  

Let’s go back to your body’s mail delivery system – aka, your hormones. Regular infrared sauna sessions will ensure that those hormone mailmen quickly and accurately get messages to the right areas of the body when it needs them most. This will lead to balanced moods, better sleep, a healthy metabolism, stable stress levels, and a boost for your heart health.  

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WRITTEN BY: Colleen Travers

Colleen Travers is a health and wellness freelance writer focusing on all things that make you feel healthy and happy from the inside out.  She's been an editor for sites such as FitnessMagazine.com and DoctorOz.com Her work has appeared online in outlets like Reader's Digest, SHAPE, HuffPost Life, Peloton, Fitbit, MindBodyGreen, and more.

1 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2451965019301048

2 Kukkonen-Harjula K, Kauppinen K. How the sauna affects the endocrine system. Ann Clin Res. 1988;20(4):262-6. PMID: 3218898.

3 Cardiovascular and Other Health Benefits of Sauna Bathing: A Review of the Evidence Laukkanen, Jari A. et al., Mayo Clinic Proceedings, Volume 93, Issue 8, 1111 – 1121

4 Tei C, Horikiri Y, Park JC, Jeong JW, Chang KS, Toyama Y, Tanaka N. Acute hemodynamic improvement by thermal vasodilation in congestive heart failure. Circulation. 1995 May 15;91(10):2582-90. doi: 10.1161/01.cir.91.10.2582. PMID: 7743620.

5 Kauppinen K, Vuori I. Man in the sauna. Ann Clin Res. 1986;18(4):173-85. PMID: 3538994.

6 Brain-gut peptides in sauna-induced hyperthermia, T. G. JENSSEN, H. H. HAUKLAND, P. G. BURHOL, First published: April 1988 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1748-1716.1988.tb08359.x